Articles

California's system for generating and distributing electricity — which has attracted little attention from the public and most policymakers in the past — became topic number one in December and January when extraordinary efforts by the state and federal governments were needed to keep the lights on. But the electricity concerns is only the latest in a series of recent efforts that focus on the state's infrastructure Transportation planners are wrestling with daunting growth projections for Southern C...

Land-use ballot measures for November 2000. Alameda County Voters approved the Sierra Club's urban growth boundary initiative drawing draw a tight urban limit line around Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore, Sunol and Castro Valley. Voters rejected the competing Tri-Valley Vision 2010 measure, a less-restrictive UGB placed on the ballot by the Board of Supervisors. Measure D (Sierra Club initiative): Yes, 56.5% Measure C (Vision 2010 plan): No, 56.9% County voters approved a 20-year extension of a hal...

Cognitive science has taught us that a human being cannot keep more than seven things in its mind at any given time. That figure, of course, does not apply to local governments in California, which appear unable to focus on more than one thing at a time. Perhaps we should set up a charitable organization for cities suffering from the condition known as Single-Purpose Agenda Syndrome (SPAS). I can see television ads right now featuring a bureaucrat, in short sleeves and pocket protector, looking b...

In Brief: Election results from Arizona, Colorado and Oregon; Stanford growth plan approved; Speaker appoints Commission on Regionalism; SCAG and HCD fight over housing allocations; Bolsa Chica development limited; Cisco announces Fremont building plans; Navy agrees to clean up Hunters Point; Kern County sludge ban upheld.

When the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proposed in September that 5.4 million acres in 31 California counties be designated critical habitat for the threatened red-legged frog, howls of outrage came from nearly every corner of the state. Builders, water agencies, local government officials and farmers decried the designation as an impending disaster with dire implications for everything from construction of affordable housing to the integrity of Southern California's precarious water supply. The...

Election Day 1998 sure looked like a watershed for ballot-box zoning in California. That was the day that voters in Ventura County and five cities there passed the so-called SOAR (Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources) initiatives, which created an almost "air-tight" system of urban growth boundaries around the cities and agricultural preservation in unincorporated areas. In the months after that election, California began to look like "SOAR-land". Reporters from around the country troo...

Planning for a long stretch of rural lands on the fringe of suburban San Diego County continues to be a roiling controversy played out in the courts, the election booth and the Board of Supervisors chambers. The county lost the latest round in the courtroom recently when Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell ruled that the environmental impact report for the general plan amendment covering 191,000 acres was inadequate. The ruling pleased environmentalists and the state Attorney General's office, but the...

Who says urban planning isn't partisan? It has certainly been many a planner's working assumption that local land use decisions in California are not affiliated with any political perspective, but are merely "good planning." In fact, since the days of 1910s reform Governor Hiram Johnson, local government has been legally devoid of party-affiliated elections. But with the assertive emergence of the Green Party in Election 2000, the fact can no longer be ignored: national political party platform...

A federal appellate court has overturned a land exchange between the Bureau of Land Management and a private company that hoped to develop a regional landfill in Imperial County. A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said the BLM grossly underestimated the value of its land where the landfill was proposed. The BLM relied on an appraisal that said the "highest and best use" of the 1,745 acres in question was open space or mine waste storage. The appraisal did not...

Environmentalists were victorious in one of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' first interpretations of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Water Act. The Ninth Circuit held that two environmental organizations could sue a Northern California lumber company for alleged Clean Water Act violations because the supposed pollution harmed members' recreational use of a creek. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that South Carolina citizens could sue the operator of a hazardo...

A development agreement between San Luis Obispo County and the developer of a subdivision and resort did not amount to an unconstitutional contracting away of the county's police power, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The opinion validates development agreements as legitimate planning tools and appears to erase any lingering doubts about the constitutionality of the practice.

The Second District Court of Appeal has overturned a City of Los Angeles decision not to permit construction of a billboard, and the court indicated the city could be liable for revenue the would-be sign builder lost. The opinion by Justice Rueben Ortega strongly suggests that political pressure from the mayor's office influenced the city's Board of Building and Safety Commissioners. The board initially refused to revoke the billboard permit on appeal. After the mayor's office intervened, t...

The Department of Energy could sell 47,000 acres in an area with five endangered species to Occidental Petroleum without consulting the Fish & Wildlife Service, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal has ruled. The federal legislation authorizing the sale of land outside Bakersfield allowed the sale to go forward without an endangered species consultation, and without Occidental applying for a new "take" permit under the Endangered Species Act, the court held. National Petroleum Reserve –...

With tens of thousands of public employees migrating to its downtown every weekday, Sacramento is very much a company town. So it is no surprise that a gigantic new building — by far the largest in the Central Valley — at 10th and I streets provides offices for state workers. Nearly 3,100 employees of the six agencies and the administrative office that comprise the California Environmental Protection Agency are scheduled to finish moving into the new CalEPA building by the middle of this mon...